Womanist theology in the caribbean context: Critiquing culture, rethinking doctrine, and expanding boundaries

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 61-82

  Stewart, Dianne M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949808491     PISSN: 87554178     EISSN: 15533913     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. According to Englebert Mveng, "anthropological poverty" "consists in despoiling human beings not only of what they have, but of everything that constitutes their being and essence - their identity, history, ethnic roots, language, culture, faith, creativity, dignity, pride, ambitions, right to speak ... we could go on indefinitely." "Third World Theology - What Theology? What Third World? Evaluation by an African Delegate," in Irruption of the Third World: Challenge to Theology, ed. Virginia Fabella and Sergio Torres (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983), 220
2. Monica Schuler, "Alas, Alas, Kongo": A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841-1865 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
3. Kenneth Bilby and Fu-Kiau Bunseki, Kumina: A Kongo-Based Tradition in the New World, Cahiers du CEDAF 1983/8 (Brussels: Centre d'etude et de documentation africaines, 1983), 1 (original emphasis). This BaKongo-derived "African" language, which has been preserved within the Kumina community, is unintelligible to the wider Jamaican population
4. Bongo, I was told by several informants, is the official name of the African ancestral homeland and the ethnic identity of the Kumina ancestors
5. See my forthcoming book Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press)
6. See Maureen Warner Lewis, The Nkuyu: Spirit Messengers of the Kumina, Pamphlet 3 (Mona, Jamaica: Savacou Publications, 1977)
7. and Edward Brathwaite, "The Spirit of African Survival in Jamaica," Jamaica Journal 42 (1978): 44-63
8. Revivalism, or Revival Zion, is an African-based Christian-influenced religion with close ties to Kumina
9. See Edward Seaga, "Revival Cults in Jamaica," Jamaica Journal 3, no. 2 (1969): 5: "Revivalist groups are not forbidden by any Statutory Law but Cultists sometimes infringe the Night Noises Prevention Law of 1911 and the so called Obeah Law of 1898, - the latter defines the consultation with practitioners of Obeah and the publication and distribution of any material 'calculated to promote the superstition of Obeah.'" According to my informants in both the Kumina and Revival Zion traditions, these laws were brutally enforced until Edward Seaga "cut the ribbon" and "gave the license" for them to practice their religions without molestation from the Jamaican police
10. By way of comparison, the Jamaica Order of Distinction catalog lists the following corecipients of the Order of Distinction, and the dates of their honors: Charles Hyatt, actor, broadcaster, and producer (Aug. 6, 1980)
11. Lt. Col. Ian Jameson, commanding officer, Third Battalion, Jamaica Regiment (Aug. 5, 1974)
12. Dr. Horace Keane, dental surgeon and past president, Jamaica Dental Association (Aug. 1, 1978)
13. Arthur Jones, Marine pilot, superintendent of pilotage, Port Authority, Kingston (Aug. 6, 1980). Imogene Kennedy is listed as a folklorist and is honored "For Services in the development of African Heritage." Chancery of the Order of Distinction, The Order of Distinction (Kingston, Jamaica: Chancery of the Order of Distinction, 1988), 35-36, 87, 123
14. Black feminist scholars have critically examined the practice of exhibiting black female bodies; see Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, ed. , Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)
15. For a thorough treatment of the ethics, politics, and controversy surrounding the exhibition of cultures in a global context, see Ivan Karp and Stephen D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991)
16. Also see Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
17. See Kelly Brown Douglas, "Womanist Theology: What Is Its Relationship to Black Theology?" in Black Theology: A Documentary History, vol. 2, 1980-1992, ed. James Cone and Gayraud Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 290-99
18. Also see Brathwaite's critique of the performance of Jamaican culture in "Spirit of African Survival."
19. Interviews with Kumina queens by the author, September 23, October 5, October 17, and November 3, 1996
20. Cited from the author's field research journal, Port Morant, St. Thomas Parish, Jamaica, October 27, 1996
21. "Bailo" are Kumina songs and chants uttered in Jamaican creole; "country" here refers to African language and/or songs
22. See JoAnne Terrell, Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998)
23. and Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993)
24. Wyatt MacGaffey, from unpublished work quoted in Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1984), 108 (original emphasis)
25. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 108
26. quoting John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire, Publications in Anthropology 5 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1974), 34
27. Zora Neale Hurston's research on the sanctified (Pentecostal) church in the early twentieth century documents that the sign of the cross as incarnated spirit/divinity has also dominated the religiosity of blacks who accepted Christianity in the United States. Hurston argues that there is a definite connection between the phenomenon of spirit possession in the sanctified church and in African-derived religions such as Vodun. See The Sanctified Church (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1981), 79-107
28. Also see Melville Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon, 1941)
29. and Schuler, "Alas, Alas, Kongo," 95
30. See Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 22-29
31. The ringshout and other hush harbor practices were aspects of slave religion whereby possession trance and other forms of ecstatic religiosity consistent with features of African religion were nurtured and freely expressed. See Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
32. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 168
33. See my Three Eyes for the Journey, chapter 3
34. Raboteau, Slave Religion
35. and Clifton H. Johnson, ed., God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1993). Although several contemporary constructive African christologies have imaged Jesus as ancestor par excellence, I am not persuaded that, in the context of slavery, Africans, who were introduced to Jesus Christ as God, would have reinterpreted this perhaps intriguing and inviting yet exotic white Christian deity as an ancestor. Ancestorhood in classical African religions concerns the family unit - its ethical codes, taboos and protocol, generativity in the family lineage, and the continuity of life, along with the acquisition and assertion of knowledge (wisdom), ontological status, and power. An analysis of the complex theology of ancestorhood falls most appropriately within the rubric of theological anthropology, for ancestors are departed family members whose names are remembered, and invisible presences felt through ritual acts of veneration and through the sacramental experiences of mundane living: eating, harvesting crops, giving birth, fishing, hunting, fighting wars, curing disease, and so on
36. See Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 75-81
37. Jacquelyn Grant, "Womanist Theology: Black Women's Experience as a Source for Doing Theology, with Special Reference to Christology," in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology, vol. 2, 273
38. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi-xii
39. Besides In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, see, for example, Walker's The Color Purple (New York: Pocket, 1982)
40. and Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (New York: Random House, 1997)
41. Walker, Color Purple, 204
42. JoAnne Terrell addresses the theme of Christian exclusivism more thoroughly than others in her womanist theology. See Power in the Blood?